San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo announces Re-Election Campaign

Liccardo: “We’ve Made Great Progress, and There’s Much More We Can Do”

San Jose, CA – San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo today announced he will run for re-election in 2018. Liccardo has spent the last two and a half years working to rebuild public safety, improve fiscal resiliency, confront poverty, expand opportunity and make City Hall as innovative as the San Jose community.

“Our world has changed dramatically since I announced my campaign for Mayor four years ago. Our nation now daily endures a spate of frenzied rhetoric emphasizing all that divides us, while public civility and trust in our national institutions continues to deteriorate. But here in San Jose, I’ve seen something different,” said Liccardo. “While the rest of our nation has become more deeply divided, in the last two years, San Jose has come together to tackle our biggest challenges, whether it is pension reform, rebuilding our police department, reinvesting in our transportation infrastructure, lifting our minimum wage, expanding opportunity for our youth or creating affordable housing.”

Liccardo continued, “Through these and other efforts, I’ve seen that our diversity makes us stronger, our differences invite better ideas and our respect for each other enables collective success. We have much more to do to build a San Jose that works for everyone, and I’m ready to continue that work for four more years.”

As San Jose’s Mayor, Sam Liccardo has worked hard to bring the City together to resolve past differences, and to build strong partnerships for future growth:

Settling pension reform battles, enabling the City to preserve $3 billion in savings to taxpayers while rebuilding the San Jose Police Department;

Working with private sector employers to provide jobs for more than two thousand youth living in gang-impacted neighborhoods through the San Jose Works program;

Co-leading a successful Measure B 2016 ballot measure campaign that will accelerate street repair and repaving, while making critical investments in BART and other congestion-relieving infrastructure;

Working with business leaders to attract new flights that have made SJC the fastest-growing airport in the nation;

Collaborating with neighboring cities to increase the minimum wage throughout the Valley;

Attracting dozens of new tech employers – including Amazon, Google and Splunk – to create more high-wage jobs;

Partnering with our schools to launch new after-school learning programs for children living in sixteen of our poorest neighborhoods;

Expanding hours at every branch library to six days per week;

Securing unanimous approval of a balanced budget for three consecutive years;

Maintaining the highest credit rating of any major California city;

Revitalizing Downtown San Jose with restaurants, shops, thousands of new residents and dozens of new tech businesses;

Creating the nation’s largest “Community Choice Energy” program, which will enable residents to choose greener sources of electricity at a competitive price;

Creating “Smart City Vision” that, for example, has brought dozens of permit processes online, and will expand broadband access for thousands of low-income students;

Leading the rebuilding of flood-ravaged neighborhoods by raising $6.9 million in private contributions, securing more than $5 million in state support and enlisting the help of more than 4,000 volunteers;

Recently launching a “BeautifySJ” campaign to clean the city, featuring such services such as free junk pick-up, an illegal dumping “rapid response” team and an easy-to-use “MySanJose” app for graffiti and other city service requests; and

Working with non-profit partners and Santa Clara County to reduce veteran and chronic homelessness, rehabilitate deteriorating motels to low-cost apartments and build new affordable housing units for hundreds of our poorest neighbors.

“I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished – and I’m most proud that we did it together as One City,” said Liccardo. “I’m honored to have served the best city in America for the last two and a half years, and I hope to continue to lead San Jose in the future.”